Gun violence has become a critical global concern for many nations and citizens. While many nations have been successful in curbing incidents of gun violence, it is clear that others are struggling to do the same. From my perspective, this is highly problematic and is something that the international community should be working much more vigilantly to combat. According to the network known as The International Action Network on Small Arms, no less than 1,000 people around the world die from small arms and light weapons everyday. As a young person living in the United States, I have witnessed IANSA’s statistics for myself, with shootings in schools, concert venues, and nightclubs being aired on the news frequently. Many people, especially young people, in North, Central, and South America have the high statistical probability of gun violence hanging over their heads wherever they go.
Personally, I appreciate IANSA as a network because, ever since their founding in 2002, they have been committed to an incredibly personal, ethical, and need-based approach to gun violence. IANSA aims to raise awareness about gun violence and concentrate resources to make them more accessible. IANSA’s website alone has resources from United Nations Conferences, videos, information about relevant campaigns, reports, and briefing papers. They even unite a significant number of NGOs and other political actors, such as Women for Peace and Democracy, Security Research and Innovation Centre, and the Arias Foundation. While more traditional organizations like the Gun Violence Archive can be circumstantially educational, I believe they often minimize the issue of gun violence and its deeply personal impacts by exclusively sharing statistics, whereas organizations like IANSA amplify the humanity behind the issue of gun violence. I have to wonder, what important considerations are we missing when we reduce people’s experiences with gun violence to just another number?
Because gun violence has such a direct impact on the lives of individuals, their families and their communities, IANSA and the organizations highly concerned with issues of human security and human rights. Human rights and security are heavily dependent on the international community. There is also a constant tension between the rights of individual people and the rights of society. For example, some people argue that it should be an individual right for them to bear arms, while others argue that the societal right of protection against gun violence should take priority. In response to this controversy, IANSA shares people’s personal anecdotes and moving pictures and videos to demonstrate the consequences of positioning an individual’s rights over a society’s. The network does this in the hopes of highlighting the lack of ethical and humanitarian considerations realized in placing the individual right to possess guns over the societal right to safety.
The intersectionality of this organization is another feature that I believe makes it the most critical international anti-gun violence network. I would argue it is also one of the newest international concerns being addressed by the network considering the term intersectionality was only coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1980s. In recent years, the issue of gun violence has come to the forefront in light of the instances of police brutality and gang violence that have taken the lives of countless black men, women, and children in the U.S. In fact, the Brookings Institution asserts that more than 11 percent of the total years of potential life lost among the black population in America can be accounted for by firearm deaths. (You can learn more about the relationship between gun violence, gender, poverty, and race in America here.) According to an article published by National Public Radio, Central and South American countries like El Salvador and Venezuela have seen gun violence escalate with increased rates of poverty, gang activity, and drug trafficking. Often, the gun violence spurred by these circumstances results in the death of innocent people who get caught in the crossfire.
The problem with traditional methods of observing international gun violence (as are modeled by the cart on the right) is that they often only consider the direct outcome–death. But as is evident in the examples from the U.S., El Salvador, and Venezuela, the impacts of gun violence are often compounded by other social circumstances, like gender, race, and poverty. The result is an array of long-term negative outcomes which death statistics fail to measure, such as poor mental health, violent behavior among youth, and increased rates of acquired disability.
“Gun violence can have a series of serious snowball effects in education, health, incarceration, family instability, and social capital . . . Individuals who witness violence are also at increased risk for a variety of mental health issues, which can manifest as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, poor academic performance, substance abuse, risky sexual behavior, delinquency, and violent behavior”
– David Hemenway, Harvard School of Public Health
These relationships between other social concerns and gun violence comprise another alternative angle that IANSA intentionally acknowledges and addresses. The network interviews people from all around the world, like Alex Galves, who was shot at a convenience store when he was a young man and now lives with a permanent disability. It also publishes briefing papers with titles like “A Call to Action by Civil Society On Gender and Small Arms Control” to educate its members about gendered issues such as firearm intimidation against women and the fundamentally gendered nature of gun ownership.
That being said, while I cannot require that you change your mind about approaches to gun violence, I can ask that you consider the benefit of alternative approaches taken by international networks like IANSA. Gun violence is acknowledged by the international community as a universal problem. Since this is the case, wouldn’t you think there would be greater international political action to combat gun violence? Yet, traditional approaches to combating gun violence have shown little merit and few alternatives have gained adequate traction among political actors. What might the reasons for this be and what are potential solutions to this international political stagnancy? To what extent could a humanitarian, intersectional approach, like the one adopted by IANSA, be part of the solution?
Sources:
Aizenman, Nurith. 2017. “Gun Violence: Comparing The U.S. With Other Countries.” NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/11/06/562323131/gun-violence-comparing-the-u-s-with-other-countries (June 10, 2020).
“George Floyd Protests Live Updates: Demonstrations Resume as Mayors Call for ‘Peace, Not Patience’.” 2020. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-protests-live-updates.html (June 10, 2020).
“International Action Network on Small Arms: IANSA.” iansaresources. https://www.iansa.org/ (June 10, 2020).
“Key Facts about Gun Violence Worldwide.” Amnesty International. https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/arms-control/gun-violence/ (June 10, 2020).
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-protests-live-updates.html
Reeves, Richard V., and Sarah Holmes. 2016. “Guns and Race: The Different Worlds of Black and White Americans.” Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2015/12/15/guns-and-race-the-different-worlds-of-black-and-white-americans/ (June 10, 2020).
“The Human Security Unit – UNITED NATIONS TRUST FUND FOR HUMAN SECURITY.” United Nations. https://www.un.org/humansecurity/ (June 11, 2020).
Image Sources:
First Image via The Cincinnati Enquirer
Second Image via PBS
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